My favorite thing about Trump's Florida performance is trusting teachers with guns to risk their lives for the students but not trusting them to form a union or believing they deserve a decent age.
It's so incredibly fitting that Trump needs an empathy crib sheet.
The embroidered cuffs are bizarre even by Trump standards, which is really saying something.
600 kids were massacred in Vegas?
I guess not kids the way high school students are kids. Just people-kids.
Wait, it's not 600 dead. 58 dead, 851 injured.
I don't know how that got so absurdly inflated in my head.
People who kid people are the luckiest people of all.
Are we ever going to find out why the professional gambler shot those 800 country music fans? Seems like he must have had some reason for it.
He only shot about 500. The others were injured in the panic.
Those kids are amazing. Is it too much to hope that 2018 brings another sea change in attitudes towards gun control and how it plays out on the national stage along with the Me Too movement?
And not to take anything away from this moment/movement but too bad about Black Lives Matter, eh?
During the cab ride to the airport on Monday the driver, who was an immigrant from (I think) the Dominican Republic, was interrogating me, as an American, about the shooting. He couldn't understand how a teenager could just walk out and buy a machine gun and was asking me to explain.
The above is not an attempt to imitate Tom Friedman.
What happened to BLM? Just that the energy preceded the Trump presidency and therefore didn't get to enjoy the energy surge like these other movements?
It just shifted to the NFL because that's where Trump decided to spray shit.
What happened to BLM is it is perceived as a movement of black people vs. the police. Unfortunately the police are popular enough that that will never be popular.
I'm sure the NRA, police unions and the rest of the extreme right wing are working feverishly right now to somehow paint the new anti-gun murder movement as also anti-police.
I don't think the police have ever been firmly on the anti-gun side. Also, I wonder if the police are starting to worry about Trump's attacks on law enforcement. This week, just out of the city in one of the places where everybody votes from Trump, a jury acquitted a white man of killing a police officer responding to a domestic violence call. I wasn't at the trial, so I don't know all of the facts, but the "he didn't identify himself as law enforcement" defense struck me as unbelievable on the face of it.
18 My impression has been that at the highest levels, like chiefs of police, they've been pretty firmly anti-gun.
The sentence construction "How about those [kids in Florida]" always makes me want to sing it to the Star Wars theme, like when Bill Murray sings "And hey! How 'bout that guy in the black mask? Did he scare you like he scared meeeeee?"
(I love that Nick the Lounge Singer sketch so goddamn much. So perfect.)
The BLM archipelago is still there, marching and organizing, but with the DOJ effectively on the other side now they don't have much national forum. They're in with the immigration groups on local community protection.
Gun control, even the favorable omens at the moment, is mostly an intra-white conversation.
The start of 18 was confusing. My bad. I was trying to say that I didn't think the police had ever been firmly anti-anti-gun or firmly pro-gun. But I would look at what the unions say, not the chiefs.
It seems like politically, including union leadership, police are represented by the absolute worst people in the profession. People who are basically anti-government militia nuts who you think might not want to join the police, until you realize they are expecting any day that their local police force will get into a guerrilla war with the FBI and come out on top and then rule their local fiefdom with an iron fist.
Local police chiefs in all the major cities seem to be infinitely more rational, including, you know, leading the sanctuary city movement because they would rather arrest people for crimes than arrest non-criminals for lack of papers, but somehow the police CHIEFS don't have political power to change anyone's mind on these things.
The BLM archipelago is still there, marching and organizing, but with the DOJ effectively on the other side now they don't have much national forum.
Yeah, this is the thing. Local efforts to reform law enforcement, including law enforcement realizing it would benefit by reforming itself, have basically been told by Jeff Sessions that they are not allowed to do so. With the possible exception of Baltimore because the trial of the Gun Trace Task Force was already underway and it has revealed said task force to be basically the city's most brutal and ruthless street gang. Now THERE'S a story that might be big news if anything other than palace intrigue was big news anymore.
23: Is it scaring you like it's scaring meeeeee?
19: Doesn't look like it from this survey - not inconsistent with their being for universal background checks, but also explicitly for armed civilians as a good thing for mass shootings and in general, and for forcing concealed carry on all states. Now, big-city police chiefs is a different story.
I don't think this is going away. And after the next mass shooting it will ramp up even more.
So, we have to wait at least a week.
... too bad about Black Lives Matter, eh?
Somebody otherwhere was pointing out that if African American teacher routinely had to carry assault weapons to and from school in their cars, like Philando Castile, the results might be... interesting. BLM would be very immediately important.
if African American teacher routinely had to carry assault weapons to and from school in their cars, like Philando Castile, the results might be... interesting
...black teachers getting killed by cops and Republicans giving the emoji shrug.
I love those kids in Florida. But if this is the nadir of Trumpism/Republicanism, we will have gotten extraordinarily lucky.
Just FYI, Phil Castile was actually a lunch aide, not a teacher. Thus far, the only significant outcome of his death is that all the past due balances of lunch money in that district were paid.
I see this as just another form of millennial entitlement. Why should they have the right not to be mowed down by antisocial misogynist former classmates with rage issues? Next they'll probably want affordable healthcare so treating their gunshot wounds doesn't bankrupt their families.
33. Sure he was. Did the cop ask him for his job description before he opened fire?
Speaking of past protests, it's good to know that nobody was convicted for toppling the Confederate statues in Durham.
36: Honestly, as I was reading the article I had the impression the defense was bullshit. They have the perpetrators on video, and the defense attorney wasn't pounding on the facts or the law, they were making arguments that the existence of the statue was a 14th Amendment violation. IANAL but (a) I'm pretty sure if that was going to work someone would have tried it before now, and (b) the legitimate procedural way to fix that isn't for a mob to pull the statue down.
I had that impression, that is, until I got to this part.
Cross-racial identification is unreliable, a point he demonstrated in court by asking Miller if Cooper and another woman looked similar. Miller said no. "We heard from the state's own witness that identified my client in the video who said that this person does not look this person, her twin sister," he said.
The twin sibling defense, classic!
Yes, the defense was bullshit. The prosecution threw the case or fucked it up accidentally.
If it weren't for those meddling kids in Durham, I never would have known the bulk of the Confederate statues were cheap-ass hollow travesties against art as well as human decency.
13.last: I first saw the comparison made when Oprah & Clooney (I think?) offered cash to the Stoneman kids, and it's definitely legit. OTOH, the two movements aren't really cognate. Liberals have been getting their asses kicked on gun control for almost 25 years, and for almost 15 years, mass killings have been accelerating, with people feeling absolute despair that anything--anything at all--would change the status quo. And then these kids show up and, overnight, change the debate.
Obviously BLM is addressing longstanding issues, but, even aside from white liberals not caring as much about black people getting killed by cops as they do about people in general being killed by white gun enthusiasts, the status of the gun control fight wasn't the same as the anti-brutality fight.
By contrast, #MeToo is more cognate with BLM, and in some ways has followed a similar path, with heming and hawing and debates about "going too far." The battle lines on sexual harassment weren't really drawn before last fall, but basically everyone in America has known where they stood on guns for decades. Before Stoneman, to be pro-gun control in America was to be publicly impotent since at least '00, even as literally dozens of national news stories illustrated the rightness and righteousness of your cause.
There was a history of stories about police brutality and sexual abuse/harassment before #BLM and #MeToo exploded, but they weren't dominating news coverage for 2-3 days every 1-2 weeks for years, while hundreds of children were buried. Again, the underlying facts of that are rooted in a fucked up society, but that's still how the world was. Once the dam broke and those stories did become steady and national, at least some concrete changes began pretty promptly. The only changes coming out of Sandy Hook and 100 others were increasing gun availability.
Anyway, I'm wondering if people are more afraid of a school shooting done by a teacher or a school shooting done by a student who swipes a gun from a teacher?
Based on the rumblings coming out of various officials and the fact that Republicans don't like young people as a class, I'm wondering if they might actually pass some kind of restriction on buying long guns before the age of 21. If it can pass, I think it would be a small (but real) improvement in public safety and a good start at shifted some momentum that might encourage more efforts at gun control.
There seems to be a rash of threats shutting down schools. Some, probably most, are 'fake' I suppose. Another one here today.
There have been a bunch locally. One at the school where they had a mass stabbing just a couple of years ago and the perpetrator just in the paper for his sentencing.
You can simultaneously believe they were guilty and the charges should been dropped. (As with the Black Friday 14.)
I'm all for putting people who stab a bunch of high school students in jail.
Anyway, according to the NRA, I'm an elitist who doesn't care about schools. If I really cared about schools, I'd be trying to defund them and spend the money on guns.
||
Even more indictments against Manafort, Gates.
|>
Let me be the first to suggest "Gategate."
Speaking as a 40-year resident of Durham, convicting the protestors would have resulted in protests big enough to shut down the city government for an extended period. If government is supposed to represent the will of the people, it functioned completely properly here.
It would be practically impossible to assemble a jury here that would have convicted any of them.
Their lawyer might not have thought that since the first batch were being tried before a judge.
You know what's stupider than getting caught breaking into an office building because you have a bright flashlight? This.
There seems to be a rash of threats shutting down schools. Some, probably most, are 'fake' I suppose.
There were rumors going around that there had been some threats at my kid's school, but the principal just sent something out that said no threats had actually occurred.
I wonder how many Trump staffers have been downloading porn from the White House and thinking the "private setting" means IT doesn't know.
Anyway, it was either that link or the one where the local man had sex with his dog which, to make it worse, he named Snoppy.
Which I can't link to now because it's just too much trouble on a phone.
What happened to BLM is it is perceived as a movement of black people vs. the police. Unfortunately the police are popular enough that that will never be popular.
It's not "perceived", it's the movement they chose to be. If you decide your marquee cases are Michael Brown, Mario Woods, and Alton Sterling then you might have misjudged the appeal of your argument.
People who are basically anti-government militia nuts who you think might not want to join the police, until you realize they are expecting any day that their local police force will get into a guerrilla war with the FBI and come out on top and then rule their local fiefdom with an iron fist.
Wait, what? Christ, am I not in the cool crowd? In ten years no one has brought up our impending war with the FBI. THIS IS BULLSHIT.
I guess you could argue that Ohio is a dystopian hellhole without peer. I have.
66: Gswift isn't discussing BLM (or anything involving cops) in good faith
68: I've been doing exactly that for close to a decade. Who the hell are you? You and anyone else are welcome to come out here and come on a ride along and get a tour of the neighborhoods and schools I work. I mean that, more people should do it. Working the west side out here is the best gig in the state.
Do it or don't, I'm not in the mood for this. I just read several accounts of someone with my exact assignment standing by and listening to his kids getting massacred. I'll probably be drinking and staring into space for a bit.
66: I agree with 68. But will go further.
Anybody who takes the word the perp that the victim was "charging like a bull" (after getting shot) (or whatever he said about Michael Brown) was a racist to begin with.
Let me add that the requirement that victims of police execution must be of flawless character, is itself a racist demand.
Christ, at least pick a name/handle whatever.
Oh, sorry, yeah, 70, 71 is me. Not sorry for what I wrote. B/c it's the truth. Far too many cops are thugs and racists, and their colleagues are complicit b/c they both cover up for them and stand in a wall with them. In a world where cops don't let their thug colleagues get away with it, there might be some argument that BLM is too extreme. Not in this world.
As a completely peripheral person, I think it is quite unwarranted to accuse gswift of bad faith. He may be wrong and no doubt sometimes is. He gets into fights here that are triggering for both sides. But unless you take the view that all US cops are compromised by their profession and so necessarily arguing in bad faith on this matter, he's arguing here and elsewhere in good faith.
I may be wrong but I don't think he has ever argued that these particular killings were right; only that it is possible to understand how they happened at least in some cases by mistake.
There is a more general point: if you are trying to improve the behaviour of a profession, I think that appeals to professionalism will in general be more effective than appeals to idealism. Whether they should be is another matter. But when you put on a uniform (writes a man in his professional uniform of dressing gown and coffee mug) you put on an ideal of behaviour, too. Inside the uniform "Would a good cop do this?" is a more immediate question than "Would a good person?" For this reason, gswift's apparently cold condemnation of some things the cops do as *unprofessional* is more likely to have traction with other cops than condemning it as racist, whether or not it also is.
NW: with respect, b/c you haven't defended these murderers and co-conspirators, "more likely to have traction" is not the point. In any effort to fix ANY problem/illness there are two things that need to happen:
(1) clear, accurate -diagnosis-
(2) effective treatment
Sure, I agree with you, that appealing to professionalism is more likely to succeed than accusing of racism. But that's got NOTHING to do with whether it's accurate as a *diagnosis*. And when a cop (of any race) covers up for his colleague's murdering an unconvicted (hence, *definitionally* innocent) civilian (we're not even getting to when they murder women and children), he's valuing his co-worker over that victim. When it happens consistently to members of some minority, that's -racist-. When a cop covers up for that, he's a racist, pure and simple.
I'm not a public policy intellectual. I'm just a -citizen-. If I sat on a civilian review board, I would probably do as you suggest. For the reasons you suggest.
BTW, in my own field, software, this conflation of diagnosis and treatment happens all the time. When I accurately diagnose a problem, imbecile managers complain that I'm not providing any solution. When in fact, it's already near-impossible to get them to accept that there's a problem, and any effective treatment is beyond the pale -- because they never accepted that there was a problem to begin with.
1) I'm not a public policy intellectual. I don't believe that anything I write changes the world much more outside this blog than on it. It is possible, I suppose, that on some matters of how the world is seen by some people I have had a small influence. But it would not be measurable. I'd like to be remembered as a tireless campaigner against bullshit, but it's hard to think of any
2) Talking further out of my depth, because I am even less of a software engineer than I am an olympic skater, it seems to me that in software there is one right diagnosis of a problem. There may not be one right solution; in fact there presumably often isn't -- sometimes there are many and sometimes there are none -- but it is possible to have a correct definition of the problem: the program ought to do this and instead it does that.
Social problems, problems of human interaction generally, aren't like that. You can have multiple, correct, overlapping diagnoses. Shooting unarmed civilians could be racism, unprofessionalism, human sinfulness, inadequate information processing, wrong policies about arming cops -- or all of these at once. Which frame you see it through depends on where you're coming from and where you're trying to get to. I'm guessing from your pseud that you're not white, and that is obviously going to affect the way you see white cops shooting PoC. It sure as hell would affect mine if it were the other way round - let's have a chat about the IRA some time - but just to choose or even use a different interpretative frame need not imply bad faith. That's the point I was trying to make.
You're right: I'm of South Asian descent. But in fact, partially due to the fact that my father was a doctor, I'm a child of the American upper-middle class, and grew up amongst white people exclusively. Small Texas town. So in the normal way, I was racist towards black people. For sure, I didn't understand their oppression -- not really -- until a few years ago, I started reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' columns in The Atlantic. He woke me.
[Growing up, I was racist enough that I've been ashamed for -years- for the things I said to some of my fellow citizens. -ashamed-. I wont't repeat them here, b/c I'm still ashamed. But even after coming to my realization of shame, I was somewhat racist toward black people. Until Coates' writings woke me.]
Yeah, possibly some of it has to do with things other than racism. Possibly. Here's the thing: in no other case, would we excuse the murder of children for nothing -- no sin, no evil act. White children can do drugs, sell drugs, and we get all het up about opioid crises and other bullshit. A black child brandishes a pellet gun, BANG! A black woman talks back to a cop, BAM! A black man holds a BB-gun in a store, BANG!
And the murderers' colleagues go along with it. Hell, they protect these fuckers. A Blue Wall. Yeah, you can torture the data, try to find some other explanation. But that's because you don't want to accept what's in front of your face.
I find that gswift generally explains, accurately, why on the prevailing standard, particular officers are going to escape criminal sanction for particular shootings. This is, to me, a useful frame for thinking about whether and how standards ought to be changed.
To 64, though, I would say that you pursue social justice with the cases you have, not the cases you wish you had. It may be that the officers involved in these particular cases should have avoided criminal sanction for the last decision they made (to pull the trigger). But it's essential that they be held accountable, administratively at the least, for the chain of decisions they made up until that point. And that those decisions be examined for stereotyping and other racial animus.
I'm also kind of curious how cued-in people here are to what their local BLM chapters are doing that isn't leading protests and whether it's accurate that they're inactive. Ours still does plenty of direct action stuff but also hosts reading groups and runs educational outreach programs and is working to address food deserts and so on. They're going to be a key part of the International Women's Day event DSA is hosting and so on. I owe the leader who's with the homeless coalition an email about getting them across the river to our school district, too.
It's also essential that decisions about whether the shooting itself was legally justifiable be made as transparently and objectively as possible. Genuinely independent outside review ought to be standard.
78 gets it right. We have a dynamic where everyone waits with bated breath to see if there will be criminal sanctions, while people who know the law know there will not be criminal sanctions, and then there aren't criminal sanctions, there's an uproar. Then we say "Oh the prosecutor completely botched this by [overcharging]/[charging for the wrong thing/[charging too many people at once]/etc" when what we need to do is... change the laws. The system is the problem! Not even the "system" made up of people, people who are all complicit or brainwashed or afraid or whatever you believe. The system meaning the laws.
I'm also kind of curious how cued-in people here are to what their local BLM chapters are doing that isn't leading protests and whether it's accurate that they're inactive.
I don't know how large or organized ours is, or if there's even an organized group at all. It's a community with a small black population, of course, and we also have a PD with a pretty good reputation for community policing and so forth. There are officer-involved shootings from time to time but incidents that provoke a lot of outrage are rare. Activism around these issues locally seems to be driven largely by Native activists but hasn't been very high-profile lately.
Looks like there was a BLM rally back in July 2016 but not much since.
I apologize for talking about the public face of cops being anti-government gun nuts above. That's more of a very-small-town thing. The crazed and attention-seeking police chief of Gilberton, PA, population 700, got a lot of notice in my circle of Eastern Pennsylvania people.
The public face of the police unions is more just out of touch and lazy. Like the people writing their press releases and social media statements are old guys who've been living in a bubble for 40 years where everyone they meet loves them and they are just incredulous that any rational non-criminal would want reform.
Ours were reduced to holding a protest to mark the fact that it had been five years since the last time the British police shot a black person at all. They blocked a few roads leading to airports.
#blackbritonsneedmoreexcitementintheirlives
On the standards question, I'd like to see if we can't get a lot stricter about negligence.
Very much agree with 78/82. The demand to prosecute all incidents as regular homicide, combined with the fact that most State law reads the Supreme Court law on constitutional standards for when police officer homicide (which ought to be a floor) as a ceiling on liability is a huge problem.
On my wish list, as I've said here before, would be a (preferably federal) crime of "reckless homicide by public safety officer" with a prison term of around 3-5 years, with "recklessness" defined to include not just the moment before the shooting but reckless behavior that could have provoked the need for the shooting. This would get something like the Tamir Rice incident (and many others) where the immediate shooting (like, the two seconds before the shooting) might have been arguably justified under constitutional standards but the officer recklessly created a situation where the shooting was necessary.
The LA Police Commission has put in a rule (for administrative sanctions) that takes that broader perspective on what constitutes a justified shooting, i.e., allowing sanctions based not only on the shooting but the officer's role in creating the need for the shooting. It almost didn't pass because of a strange convergence between the police union, who were of course horrible, and our local chapter of Black Lives Matter, who were so maximalist and unhelpful about it that they were mad that this would somehow not be enough recognition that all police are murderers, or something, which meant that they were ultimately on the same side as the police union. OTOH obviously the broader BLM movement was what was responsible for the change that led to getting the rule in, in the first place. Getting good things done in the real world is complicated.
"for when homicide by a police officer violates the federal constitution" and "ceiling on criminal liability"
Also the phrase "justified shooting" is a big problem in this context. Its actual meaning is "meets extremely lax minimum constitutional standards for a separate federal constitutional violation when a police officer kills someone," but of course people (including cops and others who should know better) take it to mean that the shooting was in an ordinary-English-language sense "justified."
It's amazing how these kids have the gun nuts and right wingers on the back foot. They're really grasping.
Borked the html: https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/status/967064414607368198
93: Wow. "We should change the name of AR-15s to Mark Rubios, because they're so easy to buy".
The kids are on fire.
This would get something like the Tamir Rice incident (and many others) where the immediate shooting (like, the two seconds before the shooting) might have been arguably justified under constitutional standards but the officer recklessly created a situation where the shooting was necessary.
Current constitutional law around police shootings is just strange. That is, there's no constitutional reason I know of (and I mean that strongly -- I don't believe there is one) that requires a different standard for self-defense for police officers than for anyone else. The 'look at the last two seconds before the shooting' standard you're talking about is, as far as I know, the standard for whether a shooting is a violation of the 14th amendment, but it could be a crime without being a violation of the 14th Amendment.
But that 14th amendment standard gets imported into discussions of police shootings as if they were entitled to be more trigger happy on self-defense than a civilian would be, and I don't know of a general legal basis for that.
I still don't get how Rice's killer is out of prison. I can see how it might be hard to convict the officer who shot Brown, but Rice was straight-up murdered.
96, 97- the standard from the constitutional cases has been interpreted to provide the reasonable basis for acting in self-defense by a public safety officer under State criminal law. In fact, many states have or had statutory or common law rules that were even more lax (ie, more officer-protective) than this constitutional minimum. For example, it was OK until the 60s-70s in many states for an officer to shoot someone fleeing in the back. There's absolutely nothing in the federal constitution that would prevent states (or the federal government, for that matter) from adopting stricter, less officer-friendly rules, but AFAIK no State has done so in its State criminal law.
Rice was straight-up murdered under any common sense interpretation of what it means to be murdered, but under the current legal regime you just look to the two seconds before the shooting, and since the cop could probably reasonably claim that he thought the toy gun was real in that moment under current law it really probably wasn't in fact legally murder. Changing that clearly unjust result requires a change in the law (either statutory or judge-made) which would be a good thing and needs to be a goal of the BLM movement.
"needs to be" in the last paragraph should be changed to "is."
And "good" to "necessary."
the standard from the constitutional cases has been interpreted to provide the reasonable basis for acting in self-defense by a public safety officer under State criminal law. In fact, many states have or had statutory or common law rules that were even more lax (ie, more officer-protective) than this constitutional minimum. For example, it was OK until the 60s-70s in many states for an officer to shoot someone fleeing in the back.
But the current legal regime, which I agree you're describing accurately as enforced, not only isn't constitutionally mandated, it's mostly not mandated by statute as far as I know. That is, judges do, in fact, apply the batshit 'reasonable police officer in the split-second before the shooting' standard, but in the states where I've looked at the statutes, there isn't a lowered standard for 'what counts as self-defense if you're a police officer' -- that lowered standard is judge-made without basis in statute or the constitution. (Cops do generally have legal authorization to use force to prevent injury to others that civilians don't, but not a statutory right to be trigger-happy on self-defense.)
A state-by-state effort to get statutory affirmation that you don't have any expanded right to kill people you're scared of just because you're wearing a badge would make a big difference, you're right, but it shouldn't be necessary. That's what the statutes on the books say now, judges and prosecutors are just horrifyingly deferential to the police.
Rice was straight-up murdered under any common sense interpretation of what it means to be murdered, but under the current legal regime you just look to the two seconds before the shooting, and since the cop could probably reasonably claim that he thought the toy gun was real in that moment under current law it really probably wasn't in fact legally murder.
Might not have been murder, but some lower level of criminal homicide, don't you think? No one who wasn't a police officer could sell 'I honestly thought that child had a real gun' as self-defense under those circumstances.
I still don't get that. Loehmann is a proven liar (it's how he got on the police force) and he shot so quickly (the video is astounding) that there's no way he could have even thought about the gun or anything but shooting.
100 -- partially judge-made, but partially statutory. Most states have special statutory rules on use of force by law enforcement. E.g.
http://ypdcrime.com/penal.law/article35.htm#p35.30
Nothing stops the states from improving those laws, except politics.
It's a crazy standard, but think about it this way -- he probably didn't actually intend to kill a random child holding a toy. "Too fast to have thought about the gun" means, even more so, "too fast to have intentionally identified this as an opportunity to commit murder and get away with it." I do, pretty much, believe that he thought at some level Rice had a real gun.
But for Joe and Jane Doe, "I thought that person had a gun" isn't a complete defense to homicide. There are open carry states, and Ohio is one of them, and you're not allowed to kill anyone you see just because they're carrying a gun. Loehmann thought that as a police officer, he was allowed to, and the courts agreed with him.
102: If you look at the statute, the problem's not with the statutory language. The standard for a non-police officer to use deadly force in self-defense is:
A person may not use deadly physical force upon another person under circumstances specified in subdivision one unless: (a) The actor reasonably believes that such other person is using or about to use deadly physical force. Even in such case, however, the actor may not use deadly physical force if he or she knows that with complete personal safety, to oneself and others he or she may avoid the necessity of so doing by retreating;
For a police officer, the standard is:
Regardless of the particular offense which is the subject of the arrest or attempted escape, the use of deadly physical force is necessary to defend the police officer or peace officer or another person from what the officer reasonably believes to be the use or imminent use of deadly physical force.
Ordinary people have a duty to retreat if they can do so in complete safety, but other than that, it's pretty much the same (cops can use deadly force other than in self-defense in some circumstances to make an arrest or prevent an escape if the crime is severe enough, but this is the self-defense standard). But judges take 'considering only the second when I killed him, I thought he could have had a gun' as a valid self-defense argument from a cop when they wouldn't take it from a civilian.
If it's legal in non-open carry states to kill someone because they're carrying a gun, you'd think the NRA would worry about that instead of bump stocks and tweeting insults at 16 year-olds.
Well, right. It's not legal to kill someone for carrying a gun in a non-open-carry state, but at least in a non-open-carry state seeing someone with a gun is a (non-conclusive) reason to think they're a lawbreaker. In Ohio, it's nothing.
"Welcome to Ohio. Enjoy our Constitutional nihilism."
After extensive legal research of nearly an entire minute I've determined that open-carry doesn't extend to those under 18 years of old. So, if it had been a real gun, Tamir Rice would have been in violation of Ohio law.
I have no idea what that proves.
If the officer thought Rice was violating Ohio law because he was underage for firearms, it means he thought he was shooting a child.
I think a big part of the conceptual problem is that police killings aren't thought of under the 'self-defense' rubric, which would make it obvious how strange the standard is. "Justified" sounds like something completely different. But trying to conceptualize the Tamir Rice killing as self-defense really makes the strangeness of it pop out.
Not only was Loehmann demonstrably lying about several things, his and his partner's conduct after the shooting was so shockingly inhumane, one would actually imagine a determined prosecutor might have been able to get them on violating Good Samaritan laws.
That gswift chooses to identify BLM's standard bearers for us, and chooses the exemplars that he does, tells you everything about the bad faith in which he argues this topic.
It's totally useless to get into these kinds of things, but FWIW I don't think GSwift is arguing in bad faith, nor do I think accusing him of doing so is remotely productive even if you disagree with him. I think he has a common, not unreasonable belief that many of the calls for police-as-murderers don't understand the current law or boundaries that officers understand in enforcing the law.
It's unfortunate IMO that the Michael Brown incident was the spark for BLM. Unfortunate because (a) Ferguson really was the epitome of a ludicrous, racist police department and general set-up, in a way that neatly points out the way black people suffer from governments generally and police departments in particular; (b) the cop who shot Brown was almost certainly a racist asshole; (c) under the current (or almost any plausible legal regime for officer use-of-force, even including the fantasy reckless use of force standard proposed by me above) it is unlikely that given what we learned of the Brown incident after investigation that the particular shooting of Michael Brown could have been successfully criminally prosecuted.
That means that protestors, BLM, etc., are rightfully up in arms about Ferguson and think it demonstrates the oppressiveness of police departments. They are right. But police officers think that it demonstrates that protestors don't care about the facts and want officers who are theoretically, and mostly actually) in a job to help people and do a public service as public servants, to be attacked as murderers without worrying about specifics. Put that way, they also have kind of a point. The only way out is to see that ultimately, the goal is legal change that helps people broadly, not litigating the facts of one individual criminal case. And if you want legal change that's possible and productive, more-or-less reasonable cops like GSwift are going to have be part of your coalition.
(c) under the current (or almost any plausible legal regime for officer use-of-force, even including the fantasy reckless use of force standard proposed by me above) it is unlikely that given what we learned of the Brown incident after investigation that the particular shooting of Michael Brown could have been successfully criminally prosecuted.
I wouldn't go this far. That is, there was conflicting eyewitness testimony, of which some made it sound like a killing that wouldn't have a hope of passing muster as self-defense under an ordinary, non-police standard. To say that it couldn't have been successfully criminally prosecuted, you have to make a real judgment about the credibility of the different witnesses, and I don't think we have the knowledge to do that reliably.
IIRC I disagree, but not even remotely enough to want to rehash the Ferguson microlitigation, so, conceded.
Oh, yeah, I didn't mean to rehash the whole thing, just to make a clear note that there is at least a live difference of opinion about whether Wilson's killing of Brown was justified -- this isn't a situation where the undisputed facts came out and everyone agreed that Wilson had no choice.
115 Of course that's pretty different from beyond reasonable doubt.
113, 115: There's not a difference of opinion with regard to the actual professionals who investigated the case, both local and federal.
Without rehashing the whole thing, the short version is basically that the physical evidence is that Brown grabbed Wilson's gun while Wilson was still in his vehicle, subsequently ran away a short distance, and then turned around and came back at Wilson.
Your conflicting eyewitness testimony is what, that Wilson tried pulling Brown into the window rather than his account that Brown assaulted him through the window? Conceding that still isn't even within the realm of a criminal charge, the police can physically detain a robbery suspect.
I apologize for talking about the public face of cops being anti-government gun nuts above.
I think everyone knew what you were talking about, I couldn't resist the joke though. Small town sheriffs are definitely often a very different animal from a metro PD.
I don't think GSwift is arguing in bad faith
God, get woke already.
the actual professionals
This really isn't a context where 'you're not competent to question the police' has a lot of weight with me.
There's no need to get back into it in detail, but plenty of people here read the grand jury testimony, and formed our own opinions about what it showed. Myself, I don't think the evidence established at all that Darren Wilson was reasonable in shooting an unarmed man, even if he was suspected of having stolen a couple of dollars worth of cigars -- what could have been proven if Wilson had been tried for homicide would have depended on the credibility of the witnesses.
And of course the BLM movement focuses on other victims as well -- a child like Tamir Rice, an innocent shopper like John Crawford, or a school employee with a broken taillight like Philando Castile, to pick a few. In light of all of those cases, claiming that BLM is discredited because people were also unhappy about Wilson's shooting an unarmed man, even if that case is marginally less clear cut, is a bad look for you.
120: Well would you argue a medical issue this way? You're not providing an actual alternative to physical evidence and professional investigators other than "there's some conflicting eyewitness testimony". There's conflicting opinions about vaccines too. But the reality is that the totality of the investigations and evidence of this case is that you're not in the neighborhood of a good faith criminal prosecution of Darren Wilson.
This conversation is too sad for me to continue.
That's a really bad analogy.
I think I've provided, in the past, an actual alternative. I want the professional investigation of the physical evidence to be done by somebody not local. The local prosecutor is being tasked with prosecuting the police officers they work with every day and whose continued cooperation is required to do their job. I think that in many cases they are obviously either incapable or unwilling to do so.
I don't know about sad, whatever, I have a movie to watch. FWIW I do think you and Moby etc are arguing in good faith, just wrong.
Halford is 100 percent right here.
But police officers think that it demonstrates that protestors don't care about the facts and want officers who are theoretically, and mostly actually) in a job to help people and do a public service as public servants, to be attacked as murderers without worrying about specifics. Put that way, they also have kind of a point. The only way out is to see that ultimately, the goal is legal change that helps people broadly, not litigating the facts of one individual criminal case. And if you want legal change that's possible and productive, more-or-less reasonable cops like GSwift are going to have be part of your coalition.
123: In this specific example I'm not sure what more you want. The investigation was done not only by an outside police agency but also done by DOJ.
I don't know what the numbers are nationwide but around here in SL County that's the standard. An OIS shooting incident is not investigated by the agency the officer works for.
I'm still thinking of Rice.
But in Ferguson, the outside presence did lots of good in terms of forcing reforms. Unless Sessions stopped that.
Do you really think BLM is that bad, gswift? You agreed with them about Tamir Rice, right? Charles Kinsey, honestly not sure and wouldn't be surprised either way.
Agree with Halford's 112.1. And also with his 112.2 and 112.3, actually.
Gswift has been commenting here for years; and he's not a troll; and his comments often add value, I think, even when everyone else disagrees with him (which is fairly often, or perhaps always, when it comes to issues of policing).
Anyway. I don't think it's fair to accuse him of arguing in bad faith.
I respect your opinion gswift, as well as your right to watch movies, but seriously, I can't imagine you think tamir rice's shooting was fair. if you're going to defend it defend it, or if not, not, but please don't just ignore it. you know they messed that shit up bad. they knew it too which is why they didn't call 911 and let him bleed out on the ground while keeping his sister away from him so he died alone. I always think, what if those were my babies and the cops wouldn't let girl x go hold girl y while she died. then I usually start crying. there was no excusable reason for any aspect of that shooting and I'd appreciate your acknowledgement of that. I know you don't think police officers never make mistakes. these officers made a series of brutal ones. you're not obliged to defend them, so...?
127: Some of them mean well but a lot are doing real harm. Quite a few seem to legit have no other goal then the total de-policing of POC and to an extent they've had some success in places like Chicago and Baltimore with disastrous results.
Before someone more woke takes me to task, I do in fact interact on a full time basis with the brown people in this area and one of my part time gigs is guarding maybe the largest HBC in the state. Today I was participating in an FTO (Field Training Officer) training. Basically FTO's are the cops who train other cops. When the subject came up of media narratives that can take off regardless of the facts the example one of the sergeants used was "hands up don't shoot". He's a second generation black officer in our dept who's grandfather was a black minister in our area.
The reality on the ground just might not be what you're being sold on social media.
Jesus christ, are you literally blaming police dysfunction in Baltimore on Black Lives Matter? What is wrong with you?
131: He's referring, as he has before, to a huge rise in murders in Baltimore since the Wilson(?) ruling.
there was no excusable reason for any aspect of that shooting and I'd appreciate your acknowledgement of that
Not sure I can give you what you're looking for. In a narrow sense the shooting part is not criminal in that the shooting officer was driven up in close proximity to an adult sized male who was called in as someone pointing a gun at people in a park who then grabbed for the gun in his waistband. Yes the call mentioned maybe a kid with a toy but none of that was communicated to the responding officers.
The driver was incompetent to what I think is easily a criminal degree. He was the supposedly experienced officer that created that situation and made the shooting happen and I would have no problem with a criminal charge on him. I think it's a tough road for the shooter given the totality of the circumstances. It turns out in hindsight he never should have been hired but that's a kind of a separate issue, still probably a good thing to bring up in the civil lawsuit.
131: The Freddie Gray prosecution was 100 percent a political and activist pander and the case so flimsy that they literally couldn't sell a locally sourced black judge on a single charge. They sent a message to the police loud and clear and now are reaping the consequences.
Yeah, that's the problem with the Baltimore Police Department.
MOVIE TIME: Fuck it, mock as you will, I'm drunk and have pre paid for my copy of Thor: Ragnarok and now is the time for viewing.
I watched that on the plane last week but never bothered to plug in my headphones. I'm not sure it changed the experience all that much although YMMV if you have a thing for dulcet Cumberbachian tones.
The merits of the prosecution's case aside, the fact of the matter is that Freddie Gray went into the police van alive, without a neck injury, and died of a severe neck injury sustained in the van. The van's claimed and actual routes and timelines differed significantly. Nobody was held criminally responsible for anything.
That's not justice.
Crime in Baltimore. Scroll down to the table. Homicide goes up ~60% in 2015 and stays there.
Anyone feeling like boiling their blood should consider watching The Final Year. It's easy to forget just how much we're throwing away with our embrace of Know-Nothingism.
137: we watched it last night with the girls and it was AWESOME.
I'm getting on a plane again, now I feel obliged to add the audio.
There's a Norwegian movie from a couple of years ago called "Ragnarok." It was pretty good in a Jurassic-Park-without-Jeff-Goldblume way.
I do in fact interact on a full time basis with the brown people
They sent a message to the police loud and clear and now are reaping the consequences
locally sourced black judge
These are the words of someone a) who sounds like a caricature of racist cop and b) believes, but seemingly isn't horrified, that activists are being systematically punished by cops, and that as a result communities of color are receiving inferior public services that make them less safe. (Or, worse still, he could believe that and, rather than being horrified by the thought, think it's just deserts.)
Honestly, given what he's written in this thread and some others on similar topics, it seems like suggesting that he's is arguing in bad faith is the most generous reading of his comments. Better that than assuming that his job has consumed his soul and left him a monster.
They're the words of someone who doesn't have a lot of patience for getting told he's the second coming of Bull Connor by some internet liberal whose sole contribution to all of this is feeling virtuous for reading Black Twitter.
That's fair, especially since I think of you as more of a Laurie Pritchett figure.
I also assume that pretty much whenever you post here at night, you're drunk, but maybe that's just projection on my part.
They way American cops are trained to be so ridiculously hostile when their authority is questioned is a big part of the problem. It's not a good look.
Man I wish my brother had never become a cop. It really does bad things to people.
Look Von Wafer, the blacks have chosen their side and they must pay the price.
149: That's probably a safe bet, especially on a weekend night. But not right now! (I'm being bored guarding a warehouse full of cigarettes)
151: Jesus Christ, that's not what I said but whatever, I really hate typing on this phone.
112: "the current law or boundaries that officers understand in enforcing the law"
The law, as both LizardBreath and Halford note somewhat above, is allowing numerous police officers to get away with what plain citizens see as murder. That is a very serious problem.
Such murders come on top of the systematic abuses revealed in Ferguson in other places: police forces that are essentially tax farmers preying on non-white citizens.
Such abuse comes alongside revelations that reasons for traffic stops -- and all of the search powers that courts have conceded at stops over the years, and all of the potential deadly confrontations arising from those stops -- include driving above the speed limit, driving below the speed limit, and driving exactly at the speed limit. The Stasi didn't have anything on that kind of guidance.
So yeah, after a while it starts to look like unchecked power to stop people that can and does lead to on-the-spot execution.
133: QED.
Anyway, post-Soviet Georgia show that about the only effective way to deal with a corrupt police force is to fire every one of them and start completely over. I think about 20-25% were re-hired.
Outside assistance and supervision from genuinely independent institutions can be a big help, but there are no guarantees. Backsliding is a potentially big issue, too, unless the structural problems are well and truly sorted out.
The converse, though, is what you have in neighboring countries: predation under the aegis of the law, a population that does not support public institutions, and a turn to private enforcement. To the extent that local law enforcement gets into bed with ICE, with whatever degree of enthusiasm, they are asking for trouble. It won't be long before they enjoy the same degree of public support in immigrant and immigrant-adjacent communities that police forces in Eastern Europe did in the waning years of communism. That's a hole it's awfully hard for a society to get out of.
getting told he's the second coming of Bull Connor by some internet liberal whose sole contribution to all of this is feeling virtuous for reading Black Twitter
Things people arguing in good faith don't do are exaggerate their opponents' positions and assumptions about their opponents motives and actions that they're not privy to. This is entirely of a piece with your choice of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray as the most important emblems of BLM's fight.
Your personalization of it is the thing that gives me pause though. Personal feelings about race aren't really the issue when we're talking about a system which produces worse outcomes for people of color at any point at which you look, though evidence alarmingly does seem to suggest that bigots are disproportionately represented in the police. You take that observation as a personal slight.